Using online educational videos for homeschooling is becoming more commonplace—whether it’s to supplement your usual curriculum, as stand-alone lessons, or to just get some learning in during one of those days. You know those days.
And why not? There is so much high-quality content available now. I mean, we’re talking well-written, researched content. Some YouTube videos are mini-documentaries, and they are available on every subject imaginable, from how to simplify fractions to the three different types of rocks!
But just because a video claims to be educational doesn’t mean it is. How do you know which videos are worth your child’s time and which are just fluff and nonsense? And how do you leverage the great content you do find to maximize educational effectiveness?
This quick guide to using online videos in your homeschool will help you master the following:
- Source credible, high-quality, educational videos.
- Turn a good educational video into a real lesson.
- Use my #1 favorite (and easy) way to level up educational videos! <—click to skip directly to this part
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Sourcing high-quality educational videos
Think credibility!
Don’t waste time on videos that purport to be educational, but are really just flashy entertainment, poorly researched, or badly produced. The quickest way to cut out the garbage is to look for established educational names you already know and trust like Khan Academy, National Geographic, or TED Talks.
What about YouTube?
Oh, YouTube. You are the best and the worst. As we all know, just because it’s on YouTube doesn’t make it true . . . or relevant . . . or appropriate. But YouTube can be an excellent source of educational material if you take a little extra time to investigate individual channels.
The same rules for credibility apply. Look for the channels of people or companies who are known to you. If a channel seems good, watch a couple of videos to see how they cite facts and what worldview they espouse. Do a quick Google search of their name and try to find their main website so you can read their About Me page. There are lots of well-researched channels aimed primarily at homeschoolers. Homeschool POP and The Amoeba Sisters are a couple of my family’s favorites!
The “ed” in Edutainment
What about video quality? Well, we’re not just talking about image resolution here. (Although video and audio quality are important. No one can learn their best from videos that feel like they’re out of the 80s!) What we’re talking about is educational value. To be valuable, videos should be logically organized, interesting, present actual facts, insights, and/or thought-provoking questions. They should not just be opinion or entertainment.
Want an example of a poor-quality video? (Hint: Many are hidden as “science experiments.”) Here’s a good example. I’m not exactly sure what makes this a science experiment. That she wears a white lab coat? That she says that it’s a science experiment? That something in a beaker bubbles up? She takes about 20 seconds (at 4:04) to identify the bubbles as carbon dioxide. Yep, that’s it. Yeah, this is a craft . . . not a science lesson.
Discover more resources to power up your homeschool here!
Turning videos into lessons
Once you find high-quality, educational videos, there are many ways to use them to enhance and support learning in your home. The most common ways to use them are:
- To pique curiosity about a new topic or deep-dive into an existing topic of interest,
- To supplement an existing curriculum, or
- To craft stand-alone lessons or unit studies.
It’s this last point I would like to talk about a little further. It takes more than just a video, even a high-quality one, to create a lesson. The video delivers the information—the facts, knowledge, or even opinion—which will constitute the raw material of the lesson. But a fully-formed lesson takes that raw material and molds it into a learning experience.
You accomplish this by adding components to the video. And you have lots of choices! Here are just a few:
- Discussion questions
- Hands-on activities
- Writing prompts
- Assessments or quizzes
When you level-up educational videos with one or more of these components that engage a child’s mind on multiple levels (talking, writing, problem-solving, using their hands) you deeply anchor the information that the video has delivered and . . . BOOM—a full-scale, effective lesson!
Check out my article about using AI as your personal homeschool assistant. It will give you step-by-step instructions and actual prompts to use to let AI create these supplemental components for you in seconds!
The Easiest, Most Effective Way to Level-Up Educational Videos
If you’re using educational videos, especially from Khan Academy, in any way in your homeschool, you must do this one thing right now! It will take you 2 minutes and it will transform those videos from superficial, passive-watching material into videos that reach out and engage with your children, helping them interact with and retain the information. That thing is . . .
Install the Puzzicle Chrome Extension!
Puzzicle is a simple extension that automatically inserts pause points into Khan Academy videos where a child is prompted to either think about and internalize an aspect of the video that was just discussed or answer a question about the material.
What does this do? Let’s look at some of the benefits.
It gives the child a low-stakes, non-threatening assessment.
No quiz phobia here! Just interactive moments that ask the child to recall something that was just discussed and respond to it. If they don’t remember, they can hit the handy button to watch the last 15 seconds over again. This is not a “Gotcha!” type assessment. It’s designed to help the child absorb and retain the information.
It remediates incorrect answers and rewards correct ones.
When a child answers incorrectly, they are simply shown what the correct answer is. No frustrating re-attempts. Just remediation of the information the video is trying to convey. A correct answer gets a confetti celebration!
The best thing . . . it revolutionizes the way the child views the video!
Hands-down, the best thing about Puzzicle is that it turns the child from a passive viewer to an active participant. The pause points not only engage the child with the material, they are a gentle way of refocusing a wandering mind. More like a conversation than a lecture.
For any parent who has asked their child to watch an educational video and then wondered why none of it stuck, Puzzicle is your answer!
Coming Soon . . .
Puzzicle will soon support select educational YouTube channels, National Geographic videos, TED Talks, and more.
Have a tip for how to incorporate online videos into your homeschool? Email me at vida@mercerhomeschooling.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to Mercer Homeschooling to receive the latest homeschool tips, resources, and encouragement right in your inbox.
